Hayden AL is a town north of Birmingham. It seems to be composed of one main section and dozens of exclaves, including some within the neighboring town of Smoke Rise.
The red dotted lines are the town boundaries.
So why all the exclaves? is there something advantageous about being in that town?
I suppose, but this is only a guess, that these exclaves are isolated houses outside the main settlement for which the town administration is supposed to provide public services.
There’s a 99% chance the answer is segregation-related. Most likely, the lots that are parts of the city are the properties on which white people lived when those lines were drawn.
It appears to have to do with a tax dispute, due to another nearby city imposing an extraterritorial sales tax, which apparently is a thing Alabama cities can do.
Blount County residents were enraged when Warrior, a nearby Jefferson County city, imposed a sales tax on its police jurisdiction last year, which extends into Blount County, Smith said.
Instead of paying a tax to Warrior, landowners who have never expressed an interest in annexation decided they wanted the protection of their own town, she said.
Since the large lump of annexations were an act of legislation, tracts of land did not need to touch a part of incorporated Hayden to annex. The result is a checkerboard of annexations, with many of the land tracts located miles from the current town limits, Smith said.
Thank you @Lord_Feldon. I was fairly sure it was some kind of tax issue.
Didn’t know Smoke Rise was an actual community.
Smoke Rise was a fictional neighborhood in Ed McBain’s 87th precinct novels. It was part of Isola, which was the novels’ version of Manhattan.
(Emphasis added)
I got to thinking about this and then looked at what’s actually in the exclaves. As far as I can tell, none of them have stores where a sales tax would be charged. So either the article quoted got the type of tax wrong or the tax would apply if the owners sold their property. I suppose the latter could be the reason. Otherwise it doesn’t make sense.
ETA: Further checking find that one of the exclaves has some stores, although the border of that exclave goes through the middle of two of them.